Photofusion Loses Arts Council Support

I heard a few days ago that Photofusion, the gallery and photography centre in Brixton, South London, has lost its Arts Council England NPO (National Portfolio of arts Organisations) status and that its funding was to be cut. I found it hard to believe, but you can now read a little more about it on the British Journal of Photography on-line. There it makes clear that the annual £150,893 revenue grant will end in March 2015.

The BJP quotes Peter Heslip, director of visual arts at ACE as saying “Photofusion did meet the criteria we set, but there were other applications we considered to be stronger.” He does go on to state “we will be exploring with the management and trustees what other options might be available to them in terms of Arts Council funding in the coming period.”

The decision would appear to be a part of a continuing attack by ACE on photography in England. In 2011 they withdrew funding from Side Gallery in Newcastle, arguably the only truly world-class photography organisation in the UK – and Side has failed to get this restored in the current round, though lottery funding for its parent organisation has kept it going.

There are still a few grants to what ACE regards as photography-specific organisations around the country, including in London both the Photographers’ Gallery and Autograph ABP . I certainly don’t begrudge Autograph its grant increase, and though I’m no great fan of the PG, it is something we obviously need – though as a long-term member (I think my membership has possibly just lapsed yet again as they are so incompetent in their record-keeping – or perhaps they just don’t want my money after what I’ve written about them) I feel they are failing photography.

Heslip says “Photography-based projects do really well on grants for the arts” and goes on to give some figures, as well as saying that most of the galleries they fund have at least one exhibition each year that features photography. But it’s a statement I can only view with utter derision.  There may be shows that have some photographic element (if only a photograph of the artist or some artistic works0 but that is not encouraging or showing photography.

I’ve had some association with Photofusion since before it started, with its pre-cursor a couple of miles away in Battersea, the Photo Co-op in Webbs Road. I’ve had my criticisms over the years but also praise, and it has played an important  role in photography in London and the South-East for many years, and I do hope it will find the resources to continue its programmes. I’ve written perhaps 20 posts about shows and events there here on >Re:PHOTO over the years – such as and contributed work to its library for many years.

The withdrawal of support from such a vital organisation supporting photography is yet another example of “the lack of any real photographic culture or support for photographers in the UK” which I last wrote about only a few days ago in Who Speaks for Photography?

 

Fuji Problems

Every May my wife takes part in a sponsored walk, and as well as sponsoring here I sometimes walk around with her (and usually a few others she has persuaded to take part), as the walk is a church crawl in the City of London. It’s pleasantly deserted on a Sunday and the selection of churches at which she has to get her walk card signed and stamped varies enough each year to keep the walk interesting.

Of course a lot of the city churches are open much of the time to visitors in any case, but there are usually a few places on the walk which Christian Aid has persuaded to open specially for the event. Mostly they are Anglican churches, but each year there are a few exceptions and these are often of particular interest. This year we went into Bevis Marks Synagogue which is an interesting place to visit (and I’ve visited once before) but unfortunately photography inside is not allowed. But everywhere else we were free to take pictures.

Most of the City churches were designed shortly after the Great Fire of London in 1666 by Christopher Wren, but the fact that the plots of land on which they are were of differing shapes and sizes gives them some individuality. Some have suffered more at the hands of restorers than others, and some were severely damaged by bombing in World War II, but overall they are a remarkable collection. Probably my favourite as a building is not by Wren but by Hawksmoor.

And as well as the churches there were also the walks between them. The city streets we walked along were all familiar, though its a while since I’ve worked there on a Sunday and had the place so empty. I took the opportunity to take a few pictures in between the churches as well, including the one above of seeing a double Gherkin.

Taking pictures when out with others is often a problem and you often have to rush what you are doing and then run to catch up with the rest of the group. But I was really going to keep Linda company (and make sure she didn’t get lost) rather than take pictures.

I was just going to take the Fuji X Pro1 and a trio of lenses – the 18-55mm, the 14mm and the 8.5mm Sanyang semi-fisheye. I could have managed without a camera bag, with one lens in each of my jacket side pockets and the third on the camera around my neck. Of course I’d need at least one spare battery, but that could easily tuck away in one of my inside pockets. But in the end I decided to take a small bag so I could also easily carry a bottle of water and a book to read on the journey. And since I was carrying a bag I might as well also take a second body, the Fuji XE-1

I suffered from a few problems using the Fujis. I was already aware that although the 14mm Fuji lens is superb, and it’s a very nice idea to be able to change from auto to manual focus by a push/pull on the focus ring, it is all to easy to do by accident. And while the signs are pretty obvious when you take pictures, it’s also easy not to notice them. I think I’d like it to be just a little harder to make the change.

The 14mm also has an ‘A’ setting on the aperture ring. It works well, enabling you to work in shutter priority or program mode, depending on whether you set a discrete shutter speed or ‘A’ on the camera shutter speed dial.  But what it lacks is some way of locking it to A, or a least a rather firm detent. It is ridiculously easy to accidentally move away from that position and find you are working at f22.  And f22 is a setting you would be better without on any such lens, with its ridiculously small physical aperture cutting performance by diffraction.

Most cameras I use need little bits of black tape on them to prevent me making unwelcome accidental changes to settings. But the aperture ring is too vital a control for this to be viable.

Doubtless I’ll get used to these things in time, and remember to check for the obvious warning signs. But one thing that happened was more worrying. On the way home I turned the cameras on to look through the pictures. No problems with the X-Pro1, but with the X-E1 all I got was a message telling me the card was empty and did I want to format it? I didn’t.

At home I put the card into my computer – which found nothing on it.  My copy of Sandisk Rescue Pro which once came free with some Sandisk cards (it now needs an annual subscription) was more successful, and recovered around 600 files it claimed were TIFF files. Unfortunately no software for reading TIFF files agreed, but by renaming them to .RAF files Adobe Bridge gave a fleeting view of the thumbnails before only showing them as black rectangles – though it could read the metadata. By using ‘IJFR‘  I managed to recover the 1920×1280 preview jpgs  but found no way to get the larger RAW images I had taken. Better than nothing, but hardly great.  I tried various other file rescue programs, but nothing else worked at all, or wanted me to pay to recover the files – without any guarantee it could actually do so. Worst of all were those programs that pretended to be free, scanned the disk and found some entries and then told you to pay up to recover them.

Some of the jpeg images were fine – like the architectural image above, but others where the lighting was rather difficult or the auto-exposure had been rather out were trickier.

Inside the churches, the Samyang 8.5mm was very useful, both with and without the partial correction of Fisheye-Hemi. (I’ve recently had to buy a new 64bit version of this plugin to use with Photoshop CC 2014.)  They really need to update the software to work with the Samyang’s unique projection, though it does still improve many images – such as that above.

These two pictures inside Saint Sepulchre-Without-Newgate,  taken from almost the same position, give a good idea of the relative views of the 14mm and 8.5mm lenses. I think had I taken the lower image with the Nikon 16mm semi-fisheye the plugin would have removed all curvature from the vertical pillars.

There are more examples in Christian Aid Circle the City, where you can also see that I had some problems in getting proper colour correction from the pictures taken outdoors in bright sun from the Fuji images. Although people often praise Fuji cameras for their colour I have more problems with this than when using Nikon. Perhaps this is a problem with Lightroom.

I do like using these two Fuji cameras, though from the reviews the Fuji XT1 might well suit me better. I’ll let you know more about that in a month or two.  But the card problem with the XE1 really has me worried. Though I asked on a Fuji facebook page and I don’t think anyone else had experienced a similar problem. But I’ve only had to try to rescue files made on other cameras when I’ve deleted files or formatted cards in error, and have managed to get these back fully unless they have been overwritten.
Continue reading Fuji Problems

Stanley Greene

Although I’d undoubtedly seen photographs by Stanley Greene before then, it was only early in 2004 that I really became aware of him as a photographer, and my immediate reaction was to sit down and write an essay of over 2000 words, ‘Stanley Greene: Witness to the World‘, which I published on the web site I was writing for shortly after.

It is no longer available, but it is perhaps no great loss, being more a telling of the major phases of his life and work to that point than offering any real insight into his photography, and is really too long to include in a post here. Like much of what I wrote then it was cannibalised from the available information from a number of sources on the web and some in print, and I have no complaint that parts of it have in turn been recycled by other web sites (though often rather more lazily well on the wrong side of the borderline between research and plagiarism.)

Here at any rate is how I began the story of his life (with a reference to links removed):

Beginning

Harlem

Stanley Greene was born in Harlem, New York in 1949. His father, also Stanley Greene, had been a part of the ‘Harlem Renaissance‘ of the 1930s, an actor and an activist, who was blacklisted as a communist in the 1950s. He kept in the business only through minor roles in movies, his name not listed in the credits. Although his father encouraged the young Stanley to think of a career in acting, he decided he wanted to become a painter. His parents gave him a camera when he was 10 and he used the camera to photograph material for his painting.

Gene Smith

The teenage Greene also became politically active, joining the Black Panthers and taking part in the anti-Vietnam movement, refusing to serve there. In 1971 he met the famous photojournalist W Eugene (Gene) Smith, who encouraged him and offered him space in his studio. Smith advised him to study photography at the School of Visual Arts in New York to get a grasp of the technical side of the medium, and later to go to the San Francisco Art Institute where the focus was on aesthetics.

California and New York

In California, Greene photographed the music scene, sending pictures of new punk and rock bands to the music magazines. In the mid 70s he helped to found the Camera Works Gallery in San Francisco, and it was while curating a show for this that he made his first visit to Paris in 1976. Dissatisfied with his life in California, he moved back to New York in the early 1980s, taking a job with Newsday, one of the larger regional newspapers in the USA. He hated it, being constantly sent to cover such minor events as delicatessen openings.

Paris Fashion

Eventually, in 1986, he was fed up enough to decide more or less on a whim to go back and live in Paris, where he had met a group of photographers who styled themselves ‘poets of photography’. Greene became a fashion photographer. Despite his success and easy lifestyle – including a taste for heroin – he was not content, haunted by the ghost of Gene Smith and the nagging of his example and his advice to photographers “You have to give something back.”

I was reminded of this by a set of Greene’s early pictures, (Never Quiet) on the Western Front, published by Lensculture,  none of which I’ve seen before, which set me off on revisiting much of his work around the web. As well as photographs there are also a number of articles about his work and interviews, and I thought again about the piece I had written in 2004 when I read in Stanley Greene’s Redemption and Revenge published by Lens in 2010 the photographer’s comment to the question of why he had brought out an autobiographical work:

“I wanted to set the record straight. I kept hearing people say, “Chechnya was when you really started to be a photographer.” And that’s not true. I was shooting back at the Berlin Wall, but nobody knew about it.“

And I thought, well those who read my piece a few years earlier certainly did – and knew too that you were a photographer before the Berlin Wall. And given that we were looking at around a million page views a month there were probably quite a few who had read at least the first few paragraphs even if they didn’t all struggle to the end of page 4.

So far I’ve only got halfway through the 25 minute interview with him in 2013 on Italian Vogue – though I’ll watch the rest later today, as he makes some interesting points. Including his observation “When you shoot film you really have time to think“.  I don’t entirely agree with this, and perhaps he also weakens his own point by going on to say he seldom ‘chimps’ when working on digital. I try to remember to take a test picture at the start of each event I photograph to check things are working properly, but seldom look at the pictures again until I’m sitting on the train on my way home. Digital does give you the choice of  being able to work differently – and in a way that I think as he does – divorces you from the situation, but you don’t have to take it.

There is a shorter interview with Green on PhotoRaw in which he also talks about digital and the attraction of film to him as well as about “Brains, guts, humanity” and the problems of being a photographer nowadays. It’s perhaps an interview that would have been better with just audio, or accompanied by a few stills, as I find the image of the photographer gets rather annoying after a minute or too.

You can of course view very many fine stories by him on Noor, the agency he was one of the founder members in 2007, one of several agencies that seem to be continuing the Magnum tradition rather better than Magnum.

An End to May

All of the posts and images for My London Diary for May 2014 are now on-line, and I hope the links are all working. Sometimes pictures do mysteriously disappear and have to be uploaded again. If you notice missing images or broken links please let me know – there is an e-mail link on each monthly page of My London Diary. There are still a few stories I have to tell about the story behind the pictures from the second half of the month – such as this:


I was escorted out of the Department for Education for taking photographs of this protest ‘class’ against education minister Michael Gove’

and about how I worked at ISO 25600 and jpeg at one event by mistake – you can probably spot which in the pictures below, and a few more.

While I’m thinking about May I decided to post some of the site statistics for that month for this blog, >Re:PHOTO.

 May 2014                                           Visitors                            Page Views
>Re:PHOTO                                        165,946                           332,582

It isn’t easy to do the same for My London Diary, as this can be reached at several different web addresses, including the new mylondondiary.uk which I have registered simply to avoid confusion. But I’m gratified to see that over 5000 people per day on average now read this blog. It’s still a little short of the audience (around a million views a month) when I wrote about photography for a commercial site – and for a living – but a very significant number. But it is quality that really counts rather than quantity – and I have no doubts on that score. You wouldn’t be reading this if you didn’t care about photography.

May 2014


Great Badger Trail ends at Westminster


Zombie Walk London
Gove “Read-In” protest in DfE
African Liberation Day protest against Vedanta


London Mosque protest for Sunni extremist
Peckham Jobcentre penalises jobseekers
Solidarity with Ukrainian Miners
Support Hunger Strike in Israeli Jails
Oromo and Ogaden against Ethiopian killings
Defend UoL Garden Halls workers
Obama keep your promises


Cyclists protest Death at the Elephant
Turks protest Soma mine deaths
Christian Aid Circle the City
Lambeth College March for Further Education


Garden Halls Closure Senate House Protest
Communists & Anti-Fa protest Ukraine Massacres
Travellers protest Spectator’s racist language
Save Independent Living Fund
Bin British Gas
Sheffield
Derbyshire


Excalibur Estate
Support Harmondsworth Mass Hunger Strike
IWGB Cleaners at Royal Opera
Horse Traps at the Nag’s Head
Baloch Hunger Strike


20 years of Women Vicars
Anti-Fur Picket at Harvey Nichols
Restore the Ethiopian Monarchy
Joint Enterprise – NOT Guilty By Association


May Day Rally


May Day March for Bob Crow & Tony Benn

The design (such as it is) of My London Diary means that the lead image used on the ‘month’ page is always in landscape format. As I’ve previously noted the increasing viewing of images on screens has led to a dramatic decrease in portrait format – so I’ve tried to redress that a little with the images on this page. The format of this blog, which limits the horizontal width to 450 pixels, works better with portrait format.

Continue reading An End to May

Can You Help?

Having just read A D Coleman’s latest post (the ninth) in his series on Capa and the fictional account of the ‘ missing pictures’  from Omaha Beach on D-Day still being told by TIME, Magnum and the ICP – which includes the discovery of another video from TIME made in 2009 including another ‘faked’ image, I  went to my e-mail to read a post from the Coleman, who asks if any readers of >Re:PHOTO can help to solve some of the mysteries of what actually happened to Capa’s film from the landing.

Here are Coleman’s four questions as he wrote them – please comment or email either to me or to Photocritic International if you can help.

1. Have any of them experienced, or heard from others working back then or since, a case of emulsion melt due to brief exposure to high heat in a drying cabinet or other situation? Any mention of such problems in the photo periodicals of the time?

2. Does anyone know, or know of, the mysterious teenage “darkroom lad” Dennis Banks, a/k/a/ Dennis Sanders?

3. Does anyone know, or know of, the London-based LIFE contract photographer Hans Wild*, who was present when the film was developed? Are there any interviews with him in which he discusses that event? Did anyone who knew him ever hear him talk about it?

4. According to Morris, he had 5 darkroom staffers present that night. If we take Wild and Banks/Sanders as two, that leaves three more who would have witnessed the consequences of the development and (if it happened) the emulsion melt. Does anyone know any of these people?

The video that has now been found on TIME was made in 2009 and includes in the middle of a strip of Capa’s pictures from D-Day one that is not by him. You can watch it better on Vimeo.

1024px-Omaha_Beach_First_Wave
Image from Wikipedia, obtained by them from PD-Archives Normandie – not by Capa

It is a picture from the U.S. Coast Guard Collection in the U.S. National Archives taken at Omaha beach – you can see it better on Wikipedia in a differently cropped version and a somewhat cruder version on the US Naval History & Heritage site. There are also some other images there from Omaha beach. The photographer is not named.

The real question I ask is why anyone should want to insert this image (and insert it rather crudely) into a video about Capa. An honest video might also have made clear that the picture of men on a packed boat (at 0m50s) although taken by Capa was not from Normandy but from Dorset, and shows US soldiers being ferried to the larger ships that would take them across the Channel.

It would perhaps be churlish to object that the pictures of Capa in uniform were not taken on D-Day, and we would not expect him to have taken these themselves, but I don’t recognise the image of a ship from above (at 1m21s) as one of his, and rather than the overprint ‘TIME’ it should perhaps have had one to indicate its source.  There are two pictures showing LCT 305 that are also probably from US Naval photographers at around 1m30s, then the picture that was re-used in the strip of Capa’s pictures. If you have more information about these it would also be of interest.

Cynthia Young, a curator at the International Photography Center in New York, annexes all these images into the Capa myth with her statement “So Capa was shooting with his camera for all of this.” But he wasn’t. He made four exposures from the landing craft before getting pushed into the water, then another eight on the beach, mainly holding his camera above his head and shooting ‘blind’ as the bullets passed over him. You can see these and others taken before and after June 6th on Magnum. Unlike the troops he could stay where he was  flat on the sand in shallow water. I’m not sure how quickly after returning with his film Capa went back to the beaches, but one of the pictures on the Magnum page taken when he returned claims also to have been made on June 6th.

Young states that a soldier was assigned to take Capa’s films back, but that these films he took were lost, and the only ones that survived were those that were not picked up. THis is a part of the myth I’ve not heard before, and I think one that does not fit the analysis in Coleman’s series of articles. It’s while she is telling the myth about the emulsion melting off the film in the ‘drying rack‘ (whatever that is) that a slightly blurred crop of the mystery image above is explicitly presented as being by Capa.   It’s a poor attempt at a forgery, being rather crudely pasted into the image strip, and not quite matching the look of the other images. As well as Cynthia Young, the blame for the misrepresentation must fall on Craig Duff who produced and edited the video, and thanks photo editor Mark Rykoff for his assistance with the images. Presumably Rykoff made clear to Duff that some of the images were not by Capa?

Does all this matter? Like Coleman I think it does. Photographs such as these are not just illustrations, but a witness statements. They say ‘I was there and this is what I saw’ and depend crucially on the integrity of the photographer – and on that of the others involved in bringing the image to public view. It matters for the same reasons that Reuters has a strict code on altering images – and fires photographers it finds to have breached it.

I think it’s also important in honouring the memory of photographers like Capa – who later died photographing another war – that we remember and value them for what they actually did, the truth about their lives and not fictions (a polite word for lies.) Finding out the true story of Capa on Omaha beach doesn’t lessen my admiration for what he did manage to do there – if anything it increase it by making me more aware of the problems that he faced. A friend I was talking with yesterday – and a former US Army photographer told me that in army training they were told that the average life of of photographer in a combat situation was twelve seconds.

____________________________________________________

* A search on Getty images brings up 3,181 pictures apparently taken by Hans Wild, who had a very long career as the first claims to have been taken on 01 Jan 1900 (but from the subject matter clearly were not) and the latest on 21 Jul 2009. The earliest appear to date from the 1930s.  Looking through the images I wonder if Hans Wild was not really a person at all, but a kind of wild card name, perhaps used for images taken by people who for contractual reasons were not named or whose names for some reason were not known. But I would like to be proved wrong!

 

Who Speaks for Photography?

I’ve often commented on the lack of any real photographic culture or support for photographers in the UK, at times contrasting the situation here with that in the other country where it also came to birth – for example in posts here such as – and also in many other countries around the world. Despite our heritage, during my lifetime at least there has been little if any evidence of any real understanding or sympathy with photography or photographers in the UK (though perhaps just a little more the further you get from London.)

I think there are many reasons for this, including the logocentric nature of British culture and the snobbishness of our class-based education system and society. The fact that photography has so many practical applications made it dismissed as a subject for vocational education, and the shift into higher education courses that has happened more recently overloaded courses with pseudo-scientific theory while refusing to take the medium itself seriously. And so on.

It is perhaps also curious that while the UK is home to the world’s leading auction houses that sell photography (including in Paris, New York…), the UK has never really been home to a leading commercial photography gallery.  The best known of those that we do have (or have had) have been those that specialise in the ‘golden age’ or British photography that seems to have ended a hundred years or more ago. People have tried – sometimes heroically – but there just is not the market in the UK.

In Who Speaks for Photography?, Francis Hodgson, professor in the Culture of Photography at the University of Brighton, in England, photography critic for the Financial Times and a former head of the photographs department at Sotheby’s and more writes his own thoughts on the failure of photography to gain any real place in our institutional culture, identifying the lack of any influential voice to stand up for the medium – and suggesting what might be done.

It is a long piece, and some may well be tempted to give up reading before they even get to where Hodgson begins to address photography, with the question:

If a museum needs to campaign against the cuts, or a change is mooted in the curriculum for ‘A’ Level study, or a failure in intellectual property law cries out for lobbying in Parliament – who speaks for photography?

And his answer (again at some length, but with at least for me, considerably more interest, and including some perhaps illuminating comparisons with cycling and gardening) is that nobody does, or at least that nobody has been in any position to do so since when the Arts Council had a Photography Officer.

Barry Lane who held that post from 1973 to 1995 certainly did something, but I suspect worked under great difficulties in that organisation, and the various switches in policy largely frustrated the development of photography in the UK. In my post mentioned above I commented:

In the UK in the late 1970s the Arts Council made the fatal mistake of handing over the medium to curators and galleries, and we  … are still suffering from it.

My view is that of a photographer, and not one that Hodgson shares, as he praises Lane’s work overseeing the “specialist photography sub-committee which carried on throughout the  allocating grants and also purchases into the Arts Council collection by acquisition.”

It was perhaps better than nothing, though I’m not convinced. I still see it as largely driving the train in the wrong direction.  And I’m not entirely convinced by his suggestion of trying to revivify the ‘Committee of National Photographic Collections’ would have a great effect, though it would be good to see it happen.

I’m not sure I have any better answer – except perhaps to move to Paris. Though supporting what we do have – such as the Photomonth East London photography festival would be a good start – something many parts of the ‘photographic establishment’ have rather turned their nose up at in the past.

More on Capa – Fraud

I’d not watched the Time video Behind the Photo in which LIFE picture editor John G. Morris talks through what happened when Capa’s 4 cassettes of 35mm film arrived at the offices in London’s Dean Street. Parts of A D Coleman‘s series of posts were based on the ‘ruined negatives’ that are displayed in that video as Morris talks.

I’d not looked at the ‘ruined negatives (stills of which which were reproduced in Coleman’s articles) closely, but photographer Rob McElroy did, and he noticed something very strange. What are presented as contact prints from the ruined negatives are clearly identical to the good negatives except that the image area has been whited out and the frame numbers removed. Simply a rather poor piece of Photoshop. Given that they have identical scratches and marks there can be no doubt that this is a crude forgery, and represents a clear attempt to deceive the viewer. You can read McElroy’s guest post on Photocritic International and the images in it are absolutely convincing.

On the video itself Morris actually gives a very clear description of the films, despite sticking to the fiction about them melting in the drying cabinet, when he says he “held up the rolls one at a time, and there was nothing on the first three rolls, but on the fourth roll there were 11 frames that had images…”

There was ‘nothing’ on the first three rolls. In other words they were just clear film. Greatly underexposed. Nothing to melt, nothing to be lost in the drying cabinet. Capa had underexposed the film that he took before the actual landing so badly that nothing was recorded. The contact prints from the actual negatives would have been black and not white. And of course the totally blank films were thrown away.

When Capa stood on the landing craft watching the soldiers making their way to the beach that there was enough light to record on the film, and when he was on the beach. Those were the frames that could be printed – and the only frames that he took of the actual landing.

In Part 8 of his series, Coleman accuses Adrian Kelterborn of Magnum Photos, in collusion with Cynthia Young of the International Center of Photography and Mia Tramz of TIME of deliberately concocting a fraud in “blatant violation of professional ethics in the field of photojournalism, as articulated in the Code of Ethics of the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA)” and he posts a copy of his letter of complaint to Sean D. Elliott of the NPPA’s Ethics Committee  urging an investigation of the matter. And as he says, surely John Morris must have seen and approved the final version of the video and thus share responsibility for the deception.

Lambeth College Leads Fight for FE

FE – Further Education – has always been a neglected area. It’s something that hasn’t been helped by the Cinderella complex that has had many of the larger and more successful colleges jumping to grab the glass slipper and aloughing off their lower level courses to become part of Higher Education. Vocational education has always been looked down on in the UK, sneered at by the Oxbridge elite who dominate our culture and politics. Of course its a class thing – but what isn’t in Britain.

Behind the specifics of the fight at Lambeth is the drive to convert public education to private profit, and this particular sector – if the Conservatives and their rich friends who own the companies trying to take over education get their way – will be the first to go.

I arrived at Clapham Common where the march was gathering a little early and had time to take a little walk around. It was a little sad to see that one particular area that I’d photographed nearby was no longer there, a small street of houses replaced by a rather dull block. Clapham has been going upmarket for many years now, and this was just a small part of the old area. I was saddened but not surprised.

There wasn’t a great deal happening when I returned to Clapham Common, and the lighting was tricky, with areas of shade under the trees along with bright sun. There was an ‘open mike’ with anyone who wanted to invited to speak, and I photographed quite a few of them, but it didn’t make for exciting images, though there were some banners to liven up the background.

Things got a lot more interesting when people were told to pick up their banners and form up for the march, but things happened rather quickly and in a very small area, so it wasn’t easy to be in the right place.

Once the march was on the street, things were a little easier, and the many banners made the march much more visible as well as giving me something to photograph. I rather like to keep my feet on the ground these days as I no longer have any head for heights at all, but I decided to clamber (with some difficulty) onto a barrier by some traffic lights for a few pictures, though some of the marchers as well as myself were rather worried about my safety!

I particularly wanted a good view of the Lambeth College Unison banner at the front of the march, just behind the rather less attractive Lambeth College UCU banner (which of course features in some other pictures), and the extra height helped with this.

One of London’s notable landmarks that the march went past was the mosaic at Stockwell tube station, to Jean Charles de Menezes, murdered catching a train here by blundering police in 2005. Of course I’ve photographed it before, but I walked over to take another picture. Later as the march came into Brixton, I went across the road to photograph the tree outside Brixton Police station, with its pictures and momentos of some of those killed by police there, including Ricky Bishop and Sean Rigg. It’s a part of the context of this march and the area the college serves. And I was particularly keen to that my pictures would show some of central Brixton, with its railway bridge across the High Street and the Underground station and shops.

As the march came to Windrush Square I ran ahead and on to the open-top bus waiting there as a platform for the speakers. But the arrival of the march there was less impressive than I had hoped, perhaps because the area is now so sterile, obviously landscaped with the intent of being hostile and unwelcoming and discouraging people from meeting there. I soon returned to ground (and an angry complaint from the event security who had failed to be around when I got on the bus so I was unable to ask for permission to board.)

Using a bus as a speaker’s platform obviously makes sense with large crowds, but this was not a particularly large crowd, though at least it meant that most of the banners stayed up for the rally. But it isn’t ideal for photography. If you work on the top of the bus with the speakers you are at best seeing them in profile or from behind, seldom ideal positions. From the ground, close to the bus the view up is too distorting, and you have to move back and use a very long lens, and some speakers who are fairly short stand so they are almost completely invisible.

Fortunately I’d put the 70-300mm in my camera bag that morning. It isn’t a huge weight, but I still don’t carry it unless I think it will be necessary. I always prefer to work as close as possible, and for most purposes the 28-105mm DX lens – equivalent at its long end to a 157mm – is longer than I need. But on this occasion it would be definitely underpowered. Most of the pictures are at 300mm, when the lens loses a little of its edge, and I would perhaps have got crisper images by taking them in DX mode at 200mm. I didn’t really need the full 7360 x 4912 pixels of the D800E.

It might also have helped to use a wider aperture; as usual I was saving thinking by using program mode, and Nikon tend to stop lenses down rather more than I would. The picture of John McDonnell was taken at 1/1000 f16 (ISO 640) and if I had been thinking I would probably have worked at f8 to avoid the softening effects of diffraction. The solution is very simple – with a turn of the thumb-wheel you engage program shift, but you have to think to do it. It was probably also a stop or two underexposed with the pattern metering being a little confused by all the bright sky, but this wasn’t a problem.

You can see more of the pictures at Lambeth College March for Further Education.

UCU members there have been on strike since 3 June and Unison members joined them in a three-day strike last week; there were solidarity protests at many colleges around the country last Wednesday.  And now there is a Sponsor a striker campaign. But there has been an almost total news blackout by newspapers and broadcast media outside of the fringe socialist press. Too many biting footballers or right wing politicians scratching their noses for a strike to be news. Next you’ll expect the BBC to report a protest.

Continue reading Lambeth College Leads Fight for FE

Garden Halls

The University of London’s Bloomsbury Garden Halls of Residence – Hughes Parry, Canterbury and Commonwealth Halls – occupy quite a large block on one side of Cartwright Gardens, in a conservation area a little south and west of St Pancras Station. They are fairly banal 20th century buildings that currently provide accommodation for around a thousand students and UoL have decided to renovate them to provide accommodation for another 200 or so.

Much of the work will be financed by a private company, the University Partnerships Programme, which will then run the new hall of residence and presumably charge increased fees to get their money back. But the work will take around two years (part may be complete after one year) during which the halls will be closed.

Around a hundred staff keep the halls running – cleaners, porters, catering and security staff – and they are to be made redundant by the contract companies that employ them, Cofely and Aramark. Most of the workers belong to the International Workers Union,the IWGB but the employing companies refuse to recognise or negotiate with the union. A curious defect of the law relating to trade unions allows employers to recognise unions that have few if any employees, while ignoring those the workers belong to. And that recognised union has failed to do anything for the workers concerned.

Working in the space where the protest started has a few photographic problems. Firstly that during daylight, the area is quite a lot darker than the views  of the outside, but there is nothing that can be done sensibly about this – you just have to let them burn out. But I also get considerable flare with people who are standing in front of these very bright areas, which needs a little treatment in Lightroom. I use an ‘adjustment brush’ with settings Contrast 22, Highlights -22, Clarity 32 and vary the values of Exposure to match the situation, and it usually helps.

In the top image on this post I carefully places the University’s Senate House board at the left of the frame and the ‘Respect and Dignity for Garden Halls Staff’ at the right of the image. For the lower image I used the 16mm full-frame fisheye. It is sharp and gives plenty of depth of field at f4 and is a good lens to work in the fairly confined space. To get a reasonable shutter speed – these are pretty active protests – I had to set ISO 2500 which allowed me to use 1/100th second. The closest figure, holding the large placard is just slightly soft as I focussed (a slight mistake) on the central figure, but fortunately she and the placard she is holding are sharp enough. Sometimes a little use of the adjustment brush with a positive value of Clarity, typically +20,  can help in cases like this, though I didn’t use it on this image. I feel, though I’m not quite sure, that the slight foreground unsharpness helps to give the picture a little more depth.


Image as taken – Nikon 16mm semi-fisheye

The Fisheye-Hemi plugin straightens out the verticals – in the original above, the doorway was noticeably curved, and the figure at right rather distorted.

Later the protesters walked around the outside of the building and then went into Stewart House, another university building which is actually connected to the Senate House. Once inside they didn’t really now what to do or where to go, and it was hard to take good pictures in the often fairly narrow corridors. And when I did so, too often I was on the wrong site of a flag – with the text visible but back to front.

Fortunately, as you can see in Garden Halls Closure Senate House Protest I did manage to get on the right side for some more pictures, but it is very easy to miss things like this in the heat of the moment – and only see them when you load the images onto computer for editing.

Continue reading Garden Halls

Birthday Events

May 14 happens to be my birthday, though I’ve had too many to make much of a fuss about it, and I still went out and took pictures. Though I didn’t start until around tea-time, having by then been out for an excellent birthday lunch with my wife at one of my favourite Indian restuarants.  I was feeling pretty good after this, having consumed with it a large bottle of that ‘Indian’ less gassy lager brewed in Bedford (costing almost as much as my buffet meal.)

And it really was fine weather, warm and sunny but not too hot, and I was in a good mood, though just a littel disappointed when I arrived outside The Spectator offices where the protest was due to start dead on time to find nobody there.

It’s not unusual for me to turn up at protests and find they don’t happen, but today I was fairly certain that this one would take place, if just a little late. Rather than waiting on the street outside the offices I decided to head towards the nearest pub, where I arrived to find a small group of the protesters standing outside (the Romany flag was a giveaway), just about to leave for the protest. Rather than drink on my own – something I seldom do – I went with them.

It was really good lighting, sun from the side, and the light walls of the offices around giving some natural fill so I didn’t need to use flash. The protesters were from the Traveller Movement, here to protest against the magazine’s publication of an article by Rod Little supporting the use of racist terms – the ‘g’ and ‘p’ words – to describe travellers, Roma and gypsies – more about this in Travellers protest Spectator’s racist language in My London Diary.

After the protesters had stood outside the offices for around a quarter of an hour, Spectator editor Fraser Nelson came out to greet them carrying a plate of chocolate cake and some serviettes.  It was, he told them his birthday, and they had far more cake inside the office than they could eat, so would they like some. Although most of the protesters decided they didn’t want to eat his cake, I had no such problems, and told him it was my own birthday too, though I was a little older as I took a large slice. It was delicious, and came as an unexpected bonus. I can’t recall ever having been at a protest before where the person being protested against has offered cake.

Not of course that cake makes his actions as an editor any more excusable. It is language that no reputable journalist would entertain, and certainly against the clear guidelines of my union, the NUJ, on the fair and accurate reporting of race relations subjects.

Soon after the protesters rang on the doorbell and went inside to deliver their letter of protest, and shortly after I left to catch a bus to the Ukranian embassy in Notting Hill. It was the evening rush hour, so the journey was slow, very slow. There are quite a lot of ‘bus lanes’ but these have a tendency to give out where they are most needed, and to be clogged by taxis elsewhere. Fortunately I was in no great hurry, and the top deck of a London bus is a good place from which to view the city, and just occasionally to take photographs from, though I don’t think I did so. Or at least, as so often, none that were worth keeping.

As I had anticipated, things were hardly starting by the time I arrived at the Ukrainian Embassy in the very posh backstreet of Holland Park.  Although a Communist newspaper described the event the following day as a ‘siege‘, the protesters were actually standing rather peacefully on the opposite side of the road, making it difficult to really connect them with the embassy visually. It didn’t help either that the embassy’s blue and yellow flag was hanging limply in a thin line down its post.

After a few minutes, some of the protesters got out their banners, and I noticed that from a particular position one was reflected in the brass plate on the embassy gate. Having taken it from the other side of the road I tried to go closer to the gate and work with the reflection, but couldn’t get it work as I wanted – and while I was trying, a police car came and parked in the way, bringing the number of diplomatic officers present to two.

The protest had united various communist groups which generally have little in common other than their opposition to US imperialism, which they saw as behind a fascist coup in the Ukraine. The incident which sparked the protest was an attack on a protest camp and Trade Unions House in Odessa on May 2, when 42 people were killed and over 200 injured by Ukrainian neo-Nazis.

They see the current government in Ukraine as openly fascist and anti-democratic and call it a ‘Neo-Nazi junta‘, though this led to a problem with the chanting of slogans, with some factions supporting the Spanish pronunciation and others the fully anglicized version of junta, and argument that got just a little heated. Some too were unhappy at being photographed by the capitalist press – that is me, who regularly gets labelled as a ‘dirty commie’ by the right wing because of my membership of the NUJ.

Of course I took the usual pictures of people with banners and placards. I played a little with putting the hammer and sickle in the corner of too many of them, but I wasn’t really too pleased with the images and wanted something a little more striking.

Eventually I think I found it, with the protest and its reflectioin in the windscreen and black bonnet of a parked car. I made a couple of frames and then moved away. It took a little care in printing to get the effect I had seen, but I rather like it.

I walked back along Holland Park towards the centre of London rather than to the closer bus stop I had come to, because I thought I would pay a visit to St Volodmyr, the patron saint of Ukraine and the king who converted the country to Christianity by decree a little over a thousand years ago. Around him now are flowers and photographs of the martyrs of the Maidan; some of them may have been fascists, but most were nationalists who wanted freedom in their country.

It was getting just a little dark, and I photographed the dark metal figure both with and without flash – as you can see in Communists & Anti-Fa protest Ukraine Massacres. The exposure above without flash has more interesting lighting and gives more detail in the statue. Flash on camera flattens the statue too much, though renders the flowers around the base of the statue in a wider view well.

It was time to go home, and to eat some of my own birthday cake after I’d blown out the candles.

Continue reading Birthday Events